After waiting over three weeks for a parcel that I …

After waiting over three weeks for a parcel that I had been assured had been sent, and after e-mailing the company who had sent it to double check, I asked at the post office hatch if perhaps the notification card had gone missing. I was told they were a fortnight behind in their deliveries, but they were doing all they could to clear the backlog.
Then in today’s newspaper I read a letter from another Name Withheld telling of a similar plight.
So here’s my question: Is Australia Post suffering from a staff shortage, has there been an unusually heavy influx of normal parcels or is the delay down to grog deliveries?
Just how much booze is coming in on the mail plane? Tons of the stuff as Cr Heenan asserts, or negligible as Bob Durnan seems to think?
And is there anyone left who still thinks we don’t have a grog problem?
There are no mail deliveries on Sundays, so let’s close the bottle shops on that day to give ourselves a day off. It won’t cost a cent. Too easy.

Hal Duell Also Commented

Grog stats may be useless as they do not include online and mail ordersAll this online buying of grog is beginning to tell an interesting story.
To buy online, a credit card is necessary, something not so easy to get and even less easy to keep without more-or-less permanent employment. It seems more and more of Alice’s residents are using this procedure to access their alcohol.
This change in retail buying then seems to mean that the bottle shops are increasingly catering to those riding the dole train – cue in urban drifters and public drinkers.
Now if that progression is accurate, then if becomes increasingly difficult to mount a good argument against turning down the tap. A good place to start would be one day a week without access to the bottle shops. And if that closure were to extend from the SA/NT border north to Elliott, central Australia just might get a weekly reprieve from the daily trauma of loud and violent public drunkenness.
To those still unconvinced, I ask why not try it? Given the obvious state of our streets and public spaces, why are you so scared to try a different approach? Clearly what we are doing just isn’t working.
Or at least it isn’t working if we want to continue (?) to be known (and let’s face it – this assumption is under real threat) as a civilised town.

Recent Comments by Hal Duell

Kids in the justice system: The stark numbers“But nobody seems to be able to work out why.”
Could it be because so many of the offenders are raised in overtly racist households where they are taught from when infants that all things Indigenous are superior to all things mainstream? For the child, the first casualty of this would be schooling and a respect for the possibilities that schooling offers.
And then when they get a bit older and come hard up against the unavoidable absurdity of what they have been taught, and realise that they are not only uneducated and ignorant but likely to remain uneducated and ignorant, anger and resentment give rise to a lashing out and a pathetic if understandable attempt to cry the victim?
“You owe me.” No, lad or lass, we don’t owe you, but your parents and early childhood mentors surely do.

Transport Hall fiasco may revive pressure groupsLast Saturday my wife and I went to a matinee showing at the Alice Cinema.
On exiting the cinema, our two hour free parking limit had expired so we went into Alice Plaza to pay the fare.
On coming out we were met with a ring of aggressive youths bristling with attitude whose gauntlet we were forced to run to gain access to our parked car.
Steve has it right. We are getting back to those days of Claire Martin levels of social dysfunction in Alice.
And from what I have seen, Darwin simply couldn’t care less.

Jacinta Price reneges on council undertakingThere was talk at one time that Nigel Scullion was getting tired of being a Senator, and that Jacinta was in line to take on that job. Something happen?
Anyway, now she says she wants to take on Snowdon in Lingiari? Good luck with that. Warren has done nothing for thirty years except win an election every three years. He’s good at it.
The $100,000 price tag for a by-election is an own goal. There are ways around it, if the Minister in charge of local government would care to consider them. Such as, offer the job to the last excluded candidate polling at least 3% of the primary vote at the previous election.

Town council’s unanimous ‘no’ to frackingFurther to my first post, if the Alice Springs Town Council could combine with the MacDonnell Shire, Barkly Shire and the Central Desert Shire to present a united anti-fracking stand, their combined voices might carry a bit more weight.
I don’t know what the other shires stand on this issue is. Have they debated it? Anyone?

Let’s have an Australia Day when we are ready for itMaybe I should start going to Council meetings again, if for no other reason than to enjoy the fireworks.
Reading the preceding comments, I am once again convinced that the whole Facebook phenomenon is a truly nasty piece of gear.
Why anyone would go there, would pay it the slightest bit of attention, is beyond me.